from the dear-barbara-streisand... dept

Robw alerts us to the news of how the UK police were able to get a blog pulled offline for daring to tell student protesters how to avoid being arrested. The police claimed that this blog post was "attempting to pervert the course of justice" and ordered the webhost to shut down the site, which it did. So... in true Streisand Effect fashion, the article started reappearing all over the place. It was posted to dozens of blogs and on Facebook as well. In the act of trying to censor this basic information, police in the UK only served to get much, much more attention to it. Maybe next time the police should spend more time keeping the peace, rather than worrying about random websites.

Police acted without authority

The Metropolitan Police don't have the authority to demand a website to be taken down, this requires a court order of some kind. The hosting company ought to have stood their ground.
The website campaign against the Metropolitan police (or at least some of their infiltration activities), so it may be there were other reasons that the Met wanted the site gone.
Didn't work.

Re: Re: Police acted without authority

Because they will have scared the website into compliance. The trouble in the UK now is the police seem to feel they can just shout "for the sake of national security" and it gives them carte blanche to do what they like. Legally they can't but most people don't want get into that kind of battle.

Knowledge is not meant for the commonman

The way the legal system is setup under Monarchy is quite similar to the way the legal system is setup under the US's Plutocracy. Loopholes are supposed to be known only to the wealthy or well-connected.

I read through that list and some of it seems to paint the protesters in a negative light.

Is it possible that authorities have secretly put the list up, pretending to be (a) protester(s), to publicly take it down in order to encourage the list to spread and make the protesters look bad?

I don't think authorities and special interest groups have yet a sophisticated enough grasp of the Internet to intelligibly manipulate it, and the streisand effect, to their advantage in a way that will effectively fool a good percentage of Internet users, but as these people become more used to the Internet their ability to skillfully manipulate it will improve.

There is little doubt that they've gotten sophisticated and coordinated enough to effectively manipulate newspapers and the MSM though, if it weren't for the Internet this would have probably gone unnoticed. That takes a lot of collusion to execute and get away with and these people demonstrate a very high degree of conspiration.

Making up laws again

Since when have the police got the authority to shut down a website? They are supposed to uphold the laws of the land, as decided elsewhere, not make up new ones as they go along. Whether something is "attempting to pervert the course of justice" is for a court and/or jury to decide. If the site owners are suspected of doing something illegal, due process should be followed. This smacks of the same problem of perfectly legal street photographers being harassed by police (and others) whilst engaged in their legitimate hobby. Police should be reined in a bit, in my opinion.